Our Online Personality
It’s no secret that potential employers may have a gander at your social media profiles while flipping through your application. I’ve heard dozens of stories about how near-successful candidates were overlooked for jobs because their Facebook profile contained a photo of them drinking from a plastic cup. Online presence is such a big thing now a days. I chatted with a friend in IT this past weekend about how to navigate my own concerns about hire-ability and my desire for self-expression. Her attitude was not to delete my Facebook albums from undergrad, but to make sure they’re only visible to friends. Take control of your public image. It makes sense. I might be comfortable schlepping about the house in a hoodie, yoga pants and flip-flops, but I would never wear that to an interview. It’s all about putting your best self out there.
So, I had mixed reactions to this study about a computer programme able to predict personality based on a person's Facebook profile.
Practice makes...better
It’s a new year with new resolutions that hopefully won’t drop off into obscurity come the icy winds of February. One of my goals for the year is to write more and write consistently. I've managed to develop my personal writing habits, and I hope it will extend to this blog.
Fear has been my main hinderance for posting. I want to write something good and that desire means I never actually finish anything. My Career Counsellor Friend said that quantity begets quality; I need to just write on a regular basis and not stress about making it perfect. But when she told me this I thought, “Why?” I wondered this not in a childish, foot-stomping petulance, but legitimately. I was genuinely curious about why writing on a regular basis will make me a better writer.
White nose in the winter
Since its emergence in 2006, White Nose Syndrome (WNS) is responsible for the deaths of millions of North American bats during the winter months. If you don’t know what it is, White Nose syndrome, is caused by a fungal infection, Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd for short). Until recently the only way to irrefutably identify WNS was to euthanize the bat and analyze its skin in the lab. However, a report published this past summer in The Journal of Wildlife Disease reveals that an old diagnostic tool for human ringworm can be re-jigged as a wildlife management tool: UV fluorescence.
Up, up, up
My friend from Alberta sent out a group text this morning: a photo of a snow-dusted gasoline pump display with “99.9” glowing in the cents/litre screen.
A few minutes later, my phone buzzed with another text, “Wow Ottawa is at 100.9…pretty close”. After my initial, “what is this witchcraft?”-reaction, I did a bit of perusing and found that apparently gas prices were predicted to drop over the holiday season. The internet rejoiced! All was saved! But the thing is, gas prices are never going to really drop; the demand is too great for the supply. The changes we’re seeing are just relative to horrifying peaks that occur during the summer months, which are cyclical anyway.
It got me wondering about the factors influencing gas prices.